super user password?

[Gilles Gravier]

 Hi, Hadi!

On 03/08/2010 08:54, hadi motamedi wrote:
> Dear All
> I have installed Ubuntu on my machine but at the Terminal I cannot
> login as super user by issuing 'su - root' . During installation it
> didn't ask me for super user password so how can I recover it ?
> Thank you

There is no super user password, because you don't need super users on
Ubuntu.

You CAN set one if you WANT... But it's not needed.

Instead of running "su -" then running a command, you should "sudo
command" and it will prompt you for your OWN password (provided your
user has administrator rights).

You can, of course, "sudo passwd root" and that will set a password for
root.

But remember that anybody who knows the root password can su to root and
do commands that aren't really audited properly (i.e. you don't know who
really IS running them if you have multiple people with the root
password). When you "sudo command" at least in the audit logs, you know
who did the command. Of course, if the command is "sudo rm -rf /" there
might not be any audit logs left if you set up your logs incorrectly. :)

Seriously, you have "sudo" for shell commands, and "gksudo" for GUI
commands. That should be enough so that you don't need to "su -". You
can, at worse, do "sudo bash" which will launch a shell, equivalent to
doing "sudo -", more or less.

Gilles.